U.S. Armed Forces - Biography, Military Biography, Family Memoirs - Biography, United States Armed Forces

Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

Name: Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails
Author: Anthony Swofford
ISBN: 9781455506736

by Anthony Swofford

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Overview

Now with the same unremitting intensity he brought to his first memoir, Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and a reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a sniper in the Marines. Adjusting to life after war, he watched his older brother succumb to cancer and his first marriage disintegrate, leading him to pursue a lifestyle in Manhattan that brought him to the brink of collapse. Consumed by drugs, drinking, expensive cars, and women, Swofford lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

When a son is in trouble he hopes to turn to his greatest source of wisdom and support: his father. But Swofford and his father didn't exactly have that kind of relationship. The key, he realized, was to confront the man-a philandering, once hard-drinking, now terminally ill Vietnam vet he had struggled hard to understand and even harder to love. The two stubborn, strong-willed war vets embarked on a series of RV trips that quickly became a kind of reckoning in which Swofford took his father to task for a lifetime of infidelities and abuse. For many years Swofford had considered combat the decisive test of a man's greatness. With the understanding that came from these trips and the fateful encounter that took him to a like-minded woman named Christa, Swofford began to understand that becoming a father himself might be the ultimate measure of his life.

Elegantly weaving his family's past with his own present-nights of excess and sexual conquest, visits with injured war veterans, and a near-fatal car crash-Swofford casts a courageous, insistent eye on both his father and himself in order to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide, after nearly ending it, what his life can and should become as a man, a veteran, and a father.

Synopsis

The publication of Jarhead launched a new career for Anthony Swofford, earning him accolades for its gritty and unexpected portraits of the soldiers who fought in the Gulf War. It spawned a Hollywood movie. It made Swofford famous and wealthy. It also nearly killed him.

Now with the same unremitting intensity he brought to his first memoir, Swofford describes his search for identity, meaning, and a reconciliation with his dying father in the years after he returned from serving as a sniper in the Marines. Adjusting to life after war, he watched his older brother succumb to cancer and his first marriage disintegrate, leading him to pursue a lifestyle in Manhattan that brought him to the brink of collapse. Consumed by drugs, drinking, expensive cars, and women, Swofford lost almost everything and everyone that mattered to him.

When a son is in trouble he hopes to turn to his greatest source of wisdom and support: his father. But Swofford and his father didn't exactly have that kind of relationship. The key, he realized, was to confront the man-a philandering, once hard-drinking, now terminally ill Vietnam vet he had struggled hard to understand and even harder to love. The two stubborn, strong-willed war vets embarked on a series of RV trips that quickly became a kind of reckoning in which Swofford took his father to task for a lifetime of infidelities and abuse. For many years Swofford had considered combat the decisive test of a man's greatness. With the understanding that came from these trips and the fateful encounter that took him to a like-minded woman named Christa, Swofford began to understand that becoming a father himself might be the ultimate measure of his life.

Elegantly weaving his family's past with his own present-nights of excess and sexual conquest, visits with injured war veterans, and a near-fatal car crash-Swofford casts a courageous, insistent eye on both his father and himself in order to make sense of what his military service meant, and to decide, after nearly ending it, what his life can and should become as a man, a veteran, and a father.

About the Author, Anthony Swofford

Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications; his memoir Jarhead was a major New York Times bestseller, and the basis for the movie of the same name. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York City.

Biography

Open up any newspaper or switch on any television news program and you will no doubt be confronted with the withered face of the war in Iraq that simply will not abate. Unfortunately, war continues to be a dismal reality that every living being has to cope with on a daily basis, but it is, indeed, a rare thing for anyone to have actually experienced lugging a 100-pound backpack while fighting in chaotic front-line combat in the Middle East. With his shattering memoir Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, Anthony Swofford gives the average civilian a pull-no-punches perspective of what it is really like to be a Marine during wartime.

Swofford's tale is not a happy one, but one that is necessary for gleaning a complete concept of not only what war means but what it does to those in the thick of it. Swofford is the product of a military lineage. His grandfather fought in World War II, his father in Vietnam. Anthony himself grew up on a military base, and while his peers were dreaming of what college they might attend, he determined to follow his familial path -- not that his parents encouraged a military career for their son. In fact, on one occasion, his father escorted a Marine recruiter from the Swofford household. However, Anthony, terrified of failure in a "normal" life, was focused on a destiny that was out of his father's hands. As he confesses in his book, "I needed the Marine Corps to save me from the other life I'd fail at -- the life of a college boy hoping to find a girlfriend and later a job."

The life Swofford sought out ultimately entailed nearly getting killed in an Iraqi booby trap, being shot by both Americans and Iraqis, physical abuse by a sadistic drill instructor, suicidal thoughts, and nagging murderous impulses. Trained to kill, and sent to the Middle East to do just that, Swofford found himself aching to perform his function, nearly shooting a comrade in the process. According to Swofford, such violent behavior simply went hand in hand with life on the frontlines. "It's an extremely violent place," he explained in an interview with Powells.com. "You're a young man who's trained to kill. It's in your head every day. You live in a very strict environment, and part of the reason you extend that violence beyond running around the jungle with your M16, say, you extend it out into the town because it's safe. You end up getting into a fight with some college kids or whatever."

Fortunately, Swofford made it out of the Marines alive, and has decided to use his horrifying experiences to enlighten the public about the reality of war without filtering it through the soft gauze of media spin. The Gulf War was portrayed as a brief skirmish that left few U.S. casualties, but Jarhead tells a different tale, addressing the psychological casualties of war. The resulting memoir has received much praise from Esquire, The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Publisher's Weekly, to name a few. Jarhead has also been the subject of a major motion picture directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty; Road to Perdition) and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as "Swoff."

As for the real Swoff, he remains devoted to a personal crusade of educating others about military life, that very same life from which his father tried so hard to protect him. Swofford recently taught a class at Lewis and Clark College in the school's "Inventing America" program. Asking his students such thorny questions as "What is war worth and how much does it cost?" and "Is America worth fighting for?" has likely sparked the kind of debate one rarely encounters on the evening news.

Good To Know

Some interesting outtakes from our interview with Swofford:

"My first job after leaving the Marine Corps was as a bank teller, and a few months into it I was robbed at gunpoint. Then I quit. Down with guns."

"Some people in my family believe we are related to Francis Scott Key, and thus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but this is not true."

"I prefer fish to steak."

"After a hard day of writing I love to cook. I am currently cooking regularly out of Batali, Boulud, and Pepin cookbooks. I still need recipes. I can walk to the market at four, shop, cook, and feed someone at nine o'clock. Then I've spent five hours away from the book, and this separation is good, and I've made something that is complete, perhaps, even, with lunch for the next day. And after eating I can revise the day's earlier work, while someone else washes the dishes."

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

In his return to memoir, Jarhead author Swofford explores his troubled relationship with his father and the long hangover that followed publishing a bestseller. After serving in the Marines during the Gulf War, Swofford attended the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. Every writer dreams of what happened next: Jarhead was made into a Hollywood film. However, celebrity only encouraged Swofford to indulge his passions for heavy drinking, good cocaine, and random sexual encounters. Meanwhile, he faced his father’s declining health and the shadow cast by his older brother’s death from cancer. Swofford opens with a swaggering declaration of his partying and sexual prowess, a tone that transforms even thoughts of suicide into chest pounding. Other sections, like his response to a vicious letter from his father, read more like therapy than literature: Swofford just hasn’t found his way to address the subject. A different, and far better, writer appears when Swofford leaves the Oedipal battlefield for a trip to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, and in the vivid reconstruction of his paternal grandparents’ romance in the Deep South before WWII. It’s the journalism rather than the memoir that makes this book worth reading. Agent: Sloan Harris.(June)

USA Today

A gritty, intense and wrenching account...

Bookpage.com

Join Anthony Swofford on his journey toward true manhood....HOTELS, HOSPITALS, AND JAILS is a powerful and sometimes painful book to read. The writing is short, staccato and rhythmic. More importantly, it's honest.

San Francisco Chronicle

Anthony Swofford has ruined me. His latest book is a memoir, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails. And it's all guts. I laughed. I cried. I sat in somber silence. I could not put this book down. As deadlines escalate around me, other books need to be read, blurb requests are stacking up, it doesn't matter, it's the Anthony Swofford show...He splays it out. He's unrelenting. This is a book many authors have to wait until their fathers die or until someone dies to be this honest at portraying their families.

The Huffington Post

Swofford shares brutally honest stories about his family, random sex, hard drinking and his difficult relationship with his father, as he tries to cope with life and post-traumatic stress...Swofford is an often-gripping narrator, at his best both angry and charismatic without apology...The chapter about visiting a veterans' hospital has rightly been singled out as a remarkable piece of writing.

Associated Press Staff

[S]earing...Swofford's prose remains as strong as ever. And his insights into his own past and present strike an honest chord.

The New Yorker

Swofford's brisk storytelling, deadpan humor, and appealing swagger.

NPR.org

Swofford is a remarkable writer, and Hotels might prove to be a timely reminder that for soldiers who have served our country overseas, returning home sometimes marks the start of yet another long battle.

The Daily Beast

If perhaps some conversations are recollected here with incredible level of accuracy, the narrative is better off for it. Swofford has put in some hard years, and he writes of his past with a grit and flair for noir that can only be honed with experience.

The Boston Globe

Remarkable....By dint of its jumpy nature, 'Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails' doesn't go into enough depth in explaining how Swofford righted his life. But his writing is too good and engaging for that to prevent the book from being a worthy entry in the pantheon of dysfunctional-family memoirs.

Sacramento News & Review

Anthony Swofford is a writer of painful and painfully powerful prose.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jarhead is a stunning success... Swofford has created what may become a classic of modern war literature, a Gulf War addition to the shelf holding Vietnam narratives such as Michael Herr's Dispatches and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War.

Newsweek

If you want a clear-eyed sense of what might be going on today in the staging areas surrounding Iraq, a view stripped of cant, hypocrisy, and the bloated lies of officialdom, read Jarhead.

New York Review of Books

Without war there would be no war stories, and Jarhead is one of the best-loopy, stoned, its prose is like three heavy metal bands playing three separate songs at once. It honors the literature of men at arms.

Library Journal

A New York Times best seller with currently 250,000 copies available, Jarhead recounted Swofford's service as a marine sniper in the Gulf War. Here he illuminates his postwar experience as he tamped down painful memories with alcohol, drugs, fast cars, and bad sex, then pulled himself together by taking a series of road trips with his terminally ill father. Jarhead was a hit, postwar memoirs are gaining momen-tum, and there's a ten-city tour.

Kirkus Reviews

Fiery follow-up memoir by the bestselling author of Jarhead (2003). In his first memoir, Swofford (Exit A, 2007, etc.) chronicled his brutal stint as a sniper in the First Gulf War. A smash success, the book was made into an eponymous Hollywood movie. Reveling in his newfound fame, Swofford relished his easy access to money, casual sex and drugs. Here, he chronicles how his overindulgence in all three resulted in the loss of his fortune. The stream of women feels endless; he cheated and lied about being in love, using sex to quell boredom and his deep, sometimes deadly, loneliness and intermittent hopelessness. Details of intimate entanglements with women, booze and a rainbow of prescription pills make for sometimes painful reading, as one relationship after another crashes and burns, and the hypersexual Swofford displays little to no emotional growth or empathy. Simultaneously, he revisits his volatile, even hateful, relationship with his father, a veteran who verbally and occasionally physically abused his three children. Swofford's father is now divorced and suffering from emphysema, but this pitiable state doesn't blunt the author's rage about his father's past failings. These include a laundry list of misdeeds, such as the time Swofford overlooked dog droppings that he'd been charged with picking up and his father dragged him across the yard and held his face inches away from the feces. Flooded with anger toward his father, Swofford is choked by grief when recalling vivid memories of his older brother, Jeff, who died of cancer as an adult. Swofford's writing, like many of his stories, is explosive. The author's voice and energy are compelling, but his hot, volcanic anger saturates the narrative, and the sheer self-indulgence and lack of filter make the book oscillate from wildly engaging to off-putting. Nonetheless, it's sure to be a bestseller.

The New York Times

…reminds us of the power of Mr. Swofford's prose—his ability to conjure a mood, a time, a place with a flick of his pen…The volume slowly accelerates into a moving and complex examination of Mr. Swofford's passive-aggressive relationship with his father.
—Michiko Kakutani